GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats.
As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the
calling application for all supported formats. The related OGR
library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides
a similar capability for simple features vector data.

GDAL supports many popular data formats, including commonly used
ones (GeoTIFF, JPEG, PNG and more) as well as the ones used in
GIS and remote sensing software packages (ERDAS Imagine,
ESRI Arc/Info, ENVI, PCI Geomatics). Also supported many remote
sensing and scientific data distribution formats such as HDF,
EOS FAST, NOAA L1B, NetCDF, FITS.

/usr/share/doc/libgdal1-dev/NEWS.Debian.gz

gdal (1.5.0-3) unstable; urgency=low
GDAL deprecated the old-style Python binding starting from 1.5 branch, so
it has been dropped in Debian. Generally you should not experience big
problems, because almost all API functions are supported by the new
Swig-based binding. If not, consider that you need to upgrade to the
current interface.
The old bindings use Numeric, the new SWIG
more»

/usr/share/doc/libgdal1-dev/changelog.Debian.gz

gdal (1.5.2-3) unstable; urgency=low
* [PATCH] sincos.dpatch: the sincos() function is already defined
in libm. Hopefully this is the only case of a redefinition
of a standard weak function. This is exploited casually only in
case of an optimization because of the reason exposed in
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-g.region--g-crashes-in-a-latlon-location-p18579971.html
(closes:
more»